This day in Great Outdoor Fight history: Beef recounts the history of Rodney Leonard Stubbs and becomes Ray’s fight roadie. It’s like those Canadian Heritage Minutes, only with the Great Outdoor Fight.

And in other news, today I can top Beef’s 127 days since the last dumbest workplace sentence (making a total of 3780 days, I would suppose), namely:

Let the students each bring their own laptop; they’ll surely work with the educational landscape and they’ll be able to do the course exercises with no problem.

That is sass in the main and also why I don’t get a proper lunch today and you don’t get a proper post today, or maybe tomorrow, as a two-day class that’s packed to the gills has had an enormous hole blown in it that’s not yet resolved. Oh, and if anybody knows the son of a bitch that invented Comic Sans the doctrine of Bring Your Own Device, please point me in his general direction. I understand he wants to taste the curb.

But I can’t leave you with nothing, so please enjoy (as a followup to yesterday’s discussion) a graphic of all 157 titles from the first ten years of :01 Books; click to embiggen, naturally, and let me know how many of them you’ve read. I think I’m at 101 (and, to be fair, some of the books on the list aren’t out yet). Not bad, still a ways to go.

Spam of the day:

(That is the common thought among ladies. These types of workouts are what allow Matthew Mc – Conaughey to keep his body lean and sculpted.

I am not qualified to declare what is or is not the common thought among ladies.

But first, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin in yesterday’s comments, not so much for his Angoulême take (which is, as usual, cogent and worth your while) as for his excellent lesson in how to curse in French. I suspect that by the end of calendar year 2016, we’ll be able to drop some really creative vulgarity in the most beautiful of languages.

Looking back in history, then:

• One day in 2012, Shaenon Garrity (Funk Queen of the Great Bay Area and Tiki Mistress Extraordinaire) embarked upon one of the greatest projects in the history of webomics: an epsiode-by-episode recapping of The X-Files in comic form. Skinner’s mighty fist! Bees! Mites! Autoerotic asphyixiation! Monster of the Week had it all. Then, after season 4 (which meant we got to see the single best hour of ’90s, Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ in season 3), concerns like giving birth to an alive human child took precedence and the recaps sadly went on hiatus.

  She’s held out the possibility of return, contingent on you people giving more to her Patreon, but unless that happens, the season 4 summary of June 2014 will be where we leave Mulder and Scully and sexy shirtless Skinner.

  Until today.

  With the return of The X-Files, Garrity has felt the siren song of unresolved sexual tension, aliens, and exactly what Scully’s been up to (wine and binging Parks & Rec), and has made with the recaps for Season X. Well, recap, singular, so far. She’ll get to the others, I mean she’s still got that kid to look out for¹.

• A little further back — a little after this here blog was getting off the ground, in the February that we first met Envelópe Martinez², a small upstart publisher called :01 Books was just getting started. 157 books later, :01 is now 10, and they’re marking the anniversary year with Happenings. Watch for authors to be on the road, interviews in public places, and every time National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang makes an appearance, keep in mind that he’s been :01 since the start.

  You’ll find people posing with their favorite :01 Books selections on the Twitter machine under #10yearsof01, and you’ll find we at Fleen talking about :01’s many offerings throughout the year. Which, uh we would have done anyway. Happy tenth, :01, and here’s to many more!

• And further back still. Yesterday marked 25 years to the day that I met my wife; today marks 25 years since the day that involved overlong and not necessarily great movies, my introduction to collegiate hockey, an unplanned side-trip (or kidnapping, in certain senses of the word) to the sovereign nation of Canada, and hassles with US Customs on the way back. With that as arguably our first date, it’s no surprise that I haven’t been able to match up with any others since.

  It is solely by her infinite forbearance and patience that I have the time to engage in this weird, obsessive hobby and pseudojournalistic hackery. If you ever see her about, thank her if you find what I do worth your time. And if you don’t, thank her anyway, because she’s the best human being.

Spam of the day:

Breaking Story: Trump has a pill for America – you have to read this..

Let me guess — contact a doctor if your election rallies last more than four hours?

______________
¹ Confidential to FQ in the BA: after taking your child for smallpox and other vaccines, be sure to remove the alien tracking device!

² Is there an interest in a Ten Years Ago At The Great Outdoor Fight runner here at Fleen? For example, we are now at ten years, one week, and one day since we first heard tell of Ramses Luther and the GOF, ten years and six days since we saw a grainy photo of The Man With The Blood On His Hands, and we are but one day from the tenth anniversary of sass in the main and the dire fates of Carl Veldt Grimps and Fancy Mark Clancy.

I think I just answered my own question.

But I haven’t studied French since high school and we never got to the rude words so I’m trusting them on this one. But I digress.

• The FIBD in Angoulême apparently decided that all of the idiocy it went through in the runup to this year’s festival wasn’t enough, and decided that as long as there are pooches to screw then par Dieu, they were gonna screw ’em. It seems ridiculous to say, but the big awards ceremony at Angoulême kicked off by presenting fake awards to unsuspecting creators and then pulling the metaphorical rug out from under them because … comics?

  The invaluable Brigid Alverson¹ has the best summary of the events, including a reasonably heartfelt apology from the host who perpetrated the cruelty, and the quote from FIBD president Franck “there are no notable women in the history of comics” Bondoux declaring that the conteremps is all our fault because they got caught being enormous dicks instead of being able to pretend it didn’t happen². Oh, wait, I was paraphrasing … the actual wording was The problem is the dictatorship of the tweet.

  No kidding, I’m wondering who in the world of comics will be willing to show up next year. The only thing I can see that will prevent name creators from abandoning Angoulême in droves is for Bondoux and his entire staff to be replaced (bitterly complaining, of course, that nobody can take a goddamned joke). I’ve always wanted to see the FIBD in person, but now you couldn’t pay me to go.

• While we’re in Europe: Rene Engström has been largely absent from webcomics for a number of years; Sofa Rap Art got taken down a while back due to the intervention of evil scammers, and last we heard from her and partner Rasmus Gran, they were expecting a child. Engström’s telling us what having a toddler around is like in her Hourly Comics today (starting here), and we have news that her most famous comics work is on its way back:
  

  Starting on the 4th of February, 6 years to the day the series first ended, I will be republishing Anders Loves Maria with both old and new content.

  The schedule will be roughly 1-2 pages per week initially.

  New ALM, y’all. Read it again for the first time, hooray!

• Speaking of February anniversaries:
  

  .@dinosaurcomics is 13 years old today! I HAVE A TEEN.

  IF YOU HAD REPRODUCTIVE SEX WHEN I STARTED MY COMIC YOU COULD ALMOST HAVE A TEEN TOO

  Congratulations on your strip anniversary Ryan and also for not making the passage of time seem creepy at all!

• And to finish things up, the inimitable Dante Shepherd (so don’t even try imit him!) has taught me about a concept that kept me from ever taking a second class in thermodynamics back in my college days³, one that befuddles the bejabbers out of more than a few baby engineers: fugacity.

  His latest science comic is the one that gave him the idea for a series of scientific-concept comics in the first place, the reason that he went out and got a grant to produce ’em, so it’s kind of a big deal. Hey, Dante, let me know if you want to get around to talking about Nyquist’s ratio or Shannon’s Figure 1 for the next set of science comics. They can’t all be about smelly stuff in tanks and columns.

Spam of the day:

Our processing center is waiting for your response

A response on a VA loan that I don’t have because I wasn’t ever in the military? Yeah, you’re gonna be waiting a while longer.

_______________
¹ Fleen Senior French Correspondent Pierre Lebeaupin has yet to check in, and we’ve been asking him to deal with a lot of complete and utter stupidity and I completely understand if he wants to give this one a miss in the interests of mental health.

² As I said, my high school French is rusty, but I can make out the meaning of Bondoux insisting on le droit à l’impertinence.

³ Aside from the fact that electrical engineers were only required to take one thermo class, and one fluid dynamics class, and there’s no rational reason to take any more of either. I bet he hasn’t taken even one class in communications systems, so he shouldn’t be getting too full of himself.

Ten years on, :01 Books remains one hell of an impressive publisher; they recognize the value in finding the best creators and the best pitches, curating a catalog down to approximately 20 boos a year, and ensuring that damn near everything they publish is indispensable. So let’s talk :01.

• We’ll start with that which we’ll have to wait the longest to see — yesterday Spike shared the news that she’s got a book coming from :01 and the subject is such a perfect fit that I momentarily don’t mind that it’s been forever since she’s had time to update Templar, AZ¹:
  

  Oh hey, I guess I can talk about it now!

  Hi guys, I’m doing a bio-comic about Josephine Baker for @01FirstSecond.

  http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016…

  We won’t get to see Black Pearl: The Graphic Life of Josephine Baker until sometime next year, but when we do I can guaran-fricking-tee it’ll be brilliant. This is the book that Spike was not born to make (that’s way too passive), but which she has, by will and determination and the sweat of her brow has designed her career and skillset to be the book that it is inevitable she make.

• Also in the future, but a good deal closer, the :01 mailroom (I’m guessing that’s mostly Gina Gagliano, an absolutely key part of their operations) has been busy, with three separate advance review copies showing up on my doorstep today. Many thanks to Ms Gagliano for Ben Hatke’s Nobody Likes A Goblin (due in June), Tony Cliff’s Delilah Dirk And The King’s Shilling (due in March, and serialized in the meantime hereabouts), and what I am prepared to call the greatest book of this or any other year: James Kochalka’s The Glorkian Warrior And the Mustache² Of Destiny (also due in March, and every day after, as it will live in your heart forever).
• And in the immediate term, available on Tuesday, 2 February (which would also be known formally as St Groundhog’s Day), Sara Varon releases her latest, Sweaterweather & Other Short Stories.

  Sweaterweather consists of eighteen shorter works, going back to the early 2000s and running as late as 2014; compared to Robot Dreams, Bake Sale, or Odd Duck, Varon’s early work is relatively quiet (almost no dialog, although sometimes there’s extensive expository text, especially in Bee Comic) and makes use of a Tezuka-like repertory cast.

  That is, Tezuka reutilized character designs and treated them like actors specializing in various roles — the officious toady, the blustery minor authority figure, the hermitlike loner, and so forth. The names may have been different, and the costumes, settings, and historical era, but the archetype remained the same.

  Likewise, Varon’s recurring characters don’t seem to be the same dog or cat (or whatever), but strike me more as just the particular dog or cat (or whatever) that happens to exist in a particular story. There’s whole families of dogs and cats (and whatevers) populating Varon’s worlds, and we get to visit with whichever ones are sharing their days with us. And that’s really what Sweaterweather is about — people have days, and we get to go along to see what happens. There’s usually nothing huge, little or no conflict, just the experience of being for a while.

  The entire thing reminds me of nothing so much as the slower, less plot-involved (and therefore most emotionally honest and delightful) portions of Tonari no Totoro. Roger Ebert described that movie as based on experience, situation and exploration — not on conflict and threat, and that turn of phrase describes Sweaterweather to a T. Pick it up and let yourself enjoy the crisp air and warm sunshine of Sweaterweather.

  Fleen thanks Gina Gagliano and everybody at :01 Books for the review copy of Sweaterweather.

Spam of the day:

Your Account Has Been Limited PayPal ID PP-658-119-347111

Apparently I need to repeat myself: I don’t have a PayPal account, because the only group of people more determined to screw everybody they come in contact with than these identity-thieving scammers is PayPal³.

________________
¹ Seriously, the entire site just consists of

<html>
<head></head>
<body></body>
</html>

and a favicon. I’m sure relaunch is on her to-do list, but under a bunch of other stuff. Whatevs, down sites don’t affect my printed copies!

² [sic]; we at Fleen prefer the spelling moustache.

³ Walmart being a close third.

So I’m undergoing mandatory training in how not to destroy my company by secretly renegotiating contracts behind the backs of the executive sales staff; the fact that I don’t ever have anything to do with contracts doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the fact that I must listen to Virtual Compliance Officer Mike drone on in his somnolent, emotionless, monotone vocoder as he reads material at me. Let’s see what’s up with webcomics before I open a vein.

• It was ten days ago that we reported the start of filming on Penny Arcade’s original web series, Automata. At the time I figured the filming would be done in a couple of weeks, depending how how elaborate locations needed to be, and if weather the cooperated. Earlier today PA benevolent dictator Robert Khoo shared the news that shooting had wrapped, just in time for PAX South to kick off tomorrow.

  No news as to whether or not any footage will be shown there (at this point, I wouldn’t hold my breath), but I stand by my hunch that at least some final cut will be available by PAX East in April. Those of you headed to San Antonio for South, have fun and remember to wash your damn hands.

• Speaking of conventions, MoCCA Fest just announced the Guests of Honor for their shindig the weekend of 2-3 April. Please be prepared to welcome:
  • Cece Bell, creator of El Deafo and winner of both the Newberry Honor and the Eisner
  • RO Blechman, Emmy Award-winning illustrator, animator, cartoonist and author
  • Phoebe Gloeckner, creator of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, which is kind of a big deal these days
  • Sonny Liew, who’s done a stack of graphic novels, including the art on The Shadow Hero (with Gene Luen Yang), and whose latest is The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
  • Rebecca Sugar, who made us all believe in Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, and Steven, and who is disgustingly young¹

  See you all at the Metropolitan West event space on 2 April.

• Still speaking of events, it appears that Angoulême managed to vote themselves a winner of the Grand Prix after all; Fleen Senior French Correspodent Pierre Lebeaupin has thoughts on the selection of Belgian cartoonist Hermann to be next year’s (largely ceremonial) President of the festival. Here’s hoping that next year’s FIBD can be held with less bumbling.

Spam of the day:

MY LAST RESPONSE

Jeeze, I hope so. You’ve been after me with your attempts to 419 me for months, Mr. Wang Zhiqiang working with Wing Lung Bank Hong Kong. Get bent.

________________
¹ Seriously, she wasn’t even born until after I’d finished my sophomore year of college. Stop being so damn young, incredibly skilled people that are achieving more than I ever have.

There’s an audacious set of Kickstarts going on with contributions from the webcomics community, both running for just shy of a month, and with the potential to fill your shelves with lots and lots of women-centered work. Let’s dig in.

• Naturally, we start with the latest on the Smut Peddler Double Header, which we noted yesterday was still too young to qualify for a spin on the Fleen Funding Formula, Mark II¹. We’re remedying that now, and as of this writing, the FFFmk2 gives SPDH an expected final total of US$162.5K +/- 32.5K, or a range of US$130K – 195K. Given that the last Smut Peddler did about US$185K and that this prediction is probably a bit of an underestimate², I’d look for a number on the high end of that range.

  Also of note: the per-backer total of $US42.81 is significantly higher (so far) than that of either of the prior two Smut Peddler projects (5709 backers @ US$32.45 for the 2014 edition, 2291 @ US$36.27 in 2012); if the 1472 backers that exist now merely hold onto the per-backer ratio (and I’d expect them to do so, as the low-priced early bird packages are all long gone, and the high-priced special art packages are yet to be added), meeting only the backer count of the 2012 edition puts the Double Header over US$152; if they reach the backer count of 2014, you’re looking at nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

• And on the just-launched end of things, a new anthology project, 1001 Knights seeks to create three hardcover volumes, each about 250 pages, with a total of 1001 original characters, who are people-positive with feminist overtones. It’s going to take more than 250 creators to pull this one off, and US$70,000 of which (as of this writing, which is not quite the same time as the writing of the last item³ — I can’t type infinitely fast people!) some US$15,000 has been raised in the couple of hours since launch.

  The webcomics-related creators that have their name associated with the project (a full list of which may be found here) include Aatmaja Pandya, Allison Strejlau, Carey Pietsch, Darryl Ayo, Isabel Melan&ccecil;on, Jordan Witt, Kori Michele Handwerker, Leisl Adams, Molly Ostertag, Ryan North, Sara Winifred Searle, Scott Wegener, Shannon Wright, Steven Sugar, and literally hundreds more.

  Wrangling this many creators and contributions is an enormous task, so I’m pleased to see a couple of things in the campaign that make me confident it won’t collapse into a never-fulfilled fiasco:

  We’ve held off on kickstarting until we we had nearly everything in hand. We’re working with Breadpig to make sure all costs are accounted for and to make sure fulfillment of rewards will be as efficient as possible. We’ve also got the job narrowed down to 3 printers.

  Not having to wait to get art in is going to be huge factor in meeting the promised (and honestly, very aggressive) delivery date of July 2016. But working with Breadpig means that they get the services of George, about whom I once said Problems see George, and wisely decide to be elsewhere. It’s still going to be a near thing to get the books laid out, to the chosen printer, proofed, printed, and transported before fulfillment can begin, but Breadpig have a history of meeting or beating delivery dates, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

  It all depends on meeting goal, though, so if you’ve got room on your shelves for between one and three hardcovers that look to be substantial and handsome, check out 1001 Knights.

Spam of the day:

Checkout the latest Engagement Rings

I’ve been married for more than 20 years, dipshit. Try harder.

_______________
¹ As a reminder, the FFFmk2 states you take the Trend value of a project at the 24-30 hour mark from Kicktraq and call that PV. The range at close will be PV/4 +/- PV/20, but has only shown to be valid for project with at least 200 backers at calculation time.

² The SPDH launched at 9:00pm EST Monday night so we’re actually at about 36 hours now, and the Kicktraq trend chart is angling downwards at this time.

³ And I just went back during the proofing pass on this post, and it’s now up to more than US$17,000, which because Kicktraq only updates totals once an hour, I can tell you is up from less than US$11,000 in 49 minutes.

So I went to bed early and wasn’t awake to watch Iron Circus Comics — aka Spike, aka The Woman Who Is Going To Own Comics Publishing, aka Maybe If You Apologize For All Those Years You Told Her She Was Never Going To Succeed She’ll Have You Killed Mercifully — launch its latest Kickstarter. Kickstarters, actually, as two pieces of pure, uncut smut went up together, and you can back one, the other, or (and stay with me here because this is a a little out there) both of them at the same time.

So, uh, maybe assume all the links in this post are probably not things you want to click on if your boss can see.

First up, Yes, Roya, a book-length graphic novel of quality erotica, written by Spike herself and illustrated by Ghost Green, with Kinomatika on the cover. It’s the early 1960s, there’s cartoonists involved, and sexy times as a young upstart finds that life behind closed doors in the Camelot era was decidedly kinkier than your parents and grandparents let on.

Secondly, My Monster Boyfriend, continuing the Iron Circus tradition of ladycentric erotica anthologies, this one is exactly what it says on the cover: there are monsters, and they are various people’s boyfriends, and there may just be hot, hot monster action going on. Lots of creators on this one, and Spike hasn’t released the full contributor list yet, but you’ll find names like EK Weaver, Jess Fink, Gail freakin’ Simone, and Trudy Cooper.

And since this is a Spike Kickstarter, a couple things we knew were going to happen did in fact happen:

1. The goal was reached ridiculously quickly after launch. Keep in mind it was 9:00pm on the east coast when the campaign went up and promptly started raising US$1000/min before tapering off to US$10K in 15 minutes, US$20K in the first hour, and the entire US$40K goal in less than eight hours. Remember, this was overnight, and word doesn’t spread so quickly when your audience are away from keyboards.
2. There’s gonna be bonuses. As a result of we at Fleen bungling a description of Iron Circus’s bonus structure a little while back , Spike reached out to us and let us know that these projects would use a different pay structure than previous project¹, one that will scale with the number of pages as well as the overfunding. For My Monster Boyfriend and Yes, Roya, pay starts at US$75/page, with an additional US$5/page for US$10,000 over goal.

   One may note that (as of this writing), pay rates are already up to US$80/page. Assuming this one goes follows the same funding patterns as prior ICC smut offerings, I’d expect funding above US$150K (NB: not a formal prediction; we’re still 8 – 12 hours away from being able to use the FFFmk2), meaning page rates of US$130 or more.

Oh, yeah, and the first stretch goal — a reprint of Smut Peddler 2012 — was met by the time Spike woke up this morning. There will be more. Oh, and did I mention that there are previews, more than 20 pages worth, over on the Kickstarter page? Because there are; no links, I’m gonna make you go read the damn thing and find ’em yourself … and before you complain, I just told you about free porn so hush.

The Smut Peddler Double Header runs until Wednesday, 24 February.

Spam of the day:

why havn’t you claimed this Walmart gift yet?

Because Walmart is a rapacious, evil corporation run by the vampiric scions of the Walton family with a bloodthirstiness that would make Vlad Tepes say Hey, maybe just chill a little, and I would rather deal with the bastard child of Verizon and Comcast for the rest of my natural life than set foot in a Walmart. The only worthwhile thing Walmart has even done is be so awful that walmart.horse provoked not a single twinge of sympathy in anybody anywhere.

______________
¹ Briefly, contributors got US$50/page, and a US$50 bonus for every US$5000 over goal.

I would have been willing to spend two or even three of my Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys coins but it turns out blizzards (70.3 cm of snow!) don’t work that way. My spine and I are going back to bed as soon as we’re done here.

• Scott McCloud will be teaching a two day class on comics at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art on 20 – 21 February (that’s a Saturday and Sunday) in Van Nuys, California. It’s US$495 for the course, but it’s probably equivalent to at least a semester’s worth of classes at Art School™ if you want to make comics, so jump on that.
• First noted during the blizzard thanks to the work of Fleen Senior French Correspodent Pierre Lebeaupin, cartoonist extraordinaire Boulet had released a do-it-yourself avatar-o-matic, the products of which I’m already starting to see pop up on Twitter. I’ma have to play around with this.

  FSFC Lebeaupin is also staying on top of the ongoing Angoulême story, and we’ll be looking to him for his reactions on the eventual winner of the Grad Prix, and whether or not the voters take the opportunity to leave off for a year.

• This makes so much sense I’m surprised it didn’t happen before today: Angela Melick, engineer and cartoonist, now has a Patreon. Jam’s one of the best — do support her.
• Of course Jim Zub is announcing another series that he’ll be writing for Marvel (Thunderbolts this time). It’s what he does.
• Diana Nock (of Intrepid Girlbot fame) is launching a new webcomic, Wonderlust, today-ish, with five pages, so be sure to scroll back to the beginning. It’s too soon to make a recommendation, but Nock’s past work makes this worth a look.

There’s a new Science Comic from Dante Shepherd, this one illustrated by Matt Lubchanksy on the topic of heat exchangers.

Spam of the day:
So, you guys know that I’ve been in an ongoing dispute with Verizon, which is why it’s especially amusing that they sent this:

Jonas is coming, are you ready?
The most common storm-related occurance is a power outage which can affect your Fios® by Verizon services.

Consider:

1. I don’t have FIOS. They know this, despite the fact that they’ve been trying to upsell me FIOS in lieu of fixing my DSL, and oh yeah — FIOS isn’t available in my area.
2. They sent this oh-so-helpful prep email approximately 03:11 on Sunday, after the snow had been stopped for some six hours.
3. They sent it again twelve hours later.

So in addition to an ongoing dispute, Verizon apparently believes I have the ability to go back in time by 36 – 48 hours.

This is an odd review to write, because although I stand second to no man as a fan of Christopher Baldwin’s Little Dee, this book isn’t really meant for me. That’s because Little Dee And The Penguin has to serve a completely different purpose for a completely different reader, and that reader and I are going to have fundamentally different experiences.

It’s meant to be read without prior knowledge of Dee and her cohorts (indeed, it starts with three separate introductions), it’s meant to tell a single story (the strip was given over to story arcs of a week or two or three, occasionally revisited over the five years it ran) with a beginning, middle, and end (although the strip had an overall direction and distinct endpoints for each of the characters, it had the ability to meander to get there). Everything that makes LDATP a success for that new reader is very possibly going to strike the longtime fan as somewhat unfamiliar.

For example, despite having second billing in the title, the desire of Paisley the Penguin to get back home¹ (and away from those that want to eat her², via a long arduous route with the occasional expat³ along the way) is really the main driving force of the narrative. Dee comes second (her arrival with the animals is a good deal more disturbing than in the strip, and as a result the overall arc from the strip of getting her back home is compressed and emphasized to where it becomes a parallel goal), and the trio of Ted (a bear), Blake (a dog), and Vachel (a vulture) fill in the background.

While Ted is still the original Ted (with the exception of really wanting to get Dee back to the human world; this sotry takes place in the immediate aftermath of meeting her), Blake and Vachel have less time to establish their two primary motivations (Blake: being a free dog and distrustful of humans; Vachel: being a jerk, but eventually a lovable one) and each is rougher-edged as a result.

Functionally, it’s a reboot, but I realize that word has specific connotations that I don’t want to imply. It’s not a case of a cheesy original becoming darker and grittier (cf: Battlestar Galactica), something cheesy becoming more radical and over the top (cf: Charlie’s Angels), or something well-loved but dated (and yeah, a little cheesy) becoming shinier and more lens flare-y (cf: Star Trek). It’s not just the same names with the serial numbers clumsily filed off; it’s a different set of character motivations and a different plot emphasis to tell a different story in a different medium. If you’re looking for an analogue, look to Snoopy Come Home.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it centers around Snoopy getting a letter from his first owner begging him to come visit her in the hospital. Although previously scarcely-mentioned, she drives the plot while the established cast is secondary and reactive to the sudden change in the status quo. The movie essentially becomes a road trip to a goal that’s not really satisfying to anybody and gets walked back to return to how things should be.

Likewise, the theme of Dee has to go back to the humans, just as soon as we lose the polar bears trying to eat Paisley and possibly the rest of us becomes a parallel quest to returning Paisley to Antarctica. Like Snoopy at Lila’s apartment, Dee’s return to the humans won’t stick and it’s only at the very end that Ted, Blake, and Vachel come around to looking at Dee the way they did in the strip (unalloyed love, affection, and whiningly begrudged tolerance, respectively). Little Dee And The Penguin is a different beast than Little Dee, but they both have the same heart, the same emphasis on family (especially one you make yourself), and the same gorgeous work from Baldwin.

But beneath it all, there’s one inescapable truth: even a diehard original-recipe purist like me is going to find LDATP charming and adorable. That younger reader that’s never met Dee and the others? She’s going to wonder why the webcomic is so slow-paced and meandering, but will revel in all the hijinks. And you know what? Little Dee and her friends have enough depth that we can both be right and love them for different reasons; after all, Dee and her friends won’t mind sharing us.

Except Vachel. That dude never shares.

An advanced review copy of Little Dee And The Penguin was provided by creator Christopher Baldwin and publisher Dial Books. The book is available for pre-order now, and will release on 5 April 2016.

Spam of the day:

This amazing water filter removes 99.9% of impurities including flouride

Let me stop you right there. In this household, we believe in the prevention of oral caries, mister!

_______________
¹ All togther now: Oooo I’m, dyin’!

² And again: Pen-go-wins is practically chickens.

³ And one mo’ ‘gain: Say pardon me, but can you help a fellow American who’s down on his luck?

But first, everybody knows that there’s a new Emily Carroll cartoon today, yes? I swear, each story that she puts out is somehow creepier than the one before, and Some Other Animal’s Meat is no exception. She gets more mileage out of one slightly wobbly line, one miniscule suggestion that Something Is Slightly Off (leading to the inevitable truth that Something Is Seriously Off And We’re All Screwed And/Or Doomed) than other horroristas get out of entire novels. 10/10 would be scared witless again.

• It has been about ten months since we pointed you to the fact that Boum was translating her La Petite Révolution into English and running it two pages per week as a webcomic. A Small Revolution had its big gut-punch climax a couple of days back, but today is the day that it wraps up. There’s been plenty of downs and precious few ups along the way, but there’s an odd potential for hope at the end of the tale.

  Revolutions lead to struggle and strife and sacrifice and disquiet¹, trees watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants; yet this particular watering might just lead to a society where just waterings are no longer necessary². Maybe all that happened was one sufferer exacted a price from those that made her suffer. Read the whole thing through.

• The Cartoon Art Musuem continues their cartoonist-in-residence program, as well as their new event-hosting partnership with the FLAX art & design retail concern at their location in the Fort Mason Center for Art & Culture. Specifically, they will be hosting Matt Harding on Saturday, 13 February, from 1:00pm to 3:00pm; the event is free and open to the public, and further details may be found here.
• It’s been a year since Exploding Kittens launched its Kickstarter campaign that became one of the biggest crowdfund deals ever. Not much you can do to surpass that, so why not try? Today marks the launch (iPhone only, booo) of the slightly modified³ Exploding Kittens play-against-your-friends app, with all in-game purchases discounted down to zero for the next four days or so.

  The only way I can think to damage your friendships more than playing Exploding Kittens would be to do so on an app, or to take up Scrabble. Those of you with iDevices, give ‘er a look while those of us with Androids look on sorrowfully from outside in the cold and snow where we’ll die of misery. Have fun without us!

Spam of the day:

Directory of engineering programs available here! Start your search to earn a degree!

I’ve had an engineering degree for more than 25 years, Bunky.

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¹ And they aren’t revolutions until they do; cf: John Adams, on the Congress’s argument as to whether or not to be so rude as to refer to George III as a tyrant, This is a revolution, dammit! We’re going to have to offend somebody!

² I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Painting and Poetry Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams, 12 May 1780

³ It lacks NOPE! functionality, booo.